How long does day 9 of the 30-day challenge take?

About five minutes of hands-on work against the org you picked on day one, plus two or three minutes of reading. If you are short on time the exercise alone still delivers the day's point.

Do I need any tools or paid data for score candidate #1 end-to-end?

No. Every exercise in the challenge runs on public GitHub data and a browser. The feed that automates the same checks is available, but the curriculum itself is deliberately tool-free so the habit lands before the tooling.

What if I miss a day of the 30-day deal flow challenge?

Every day is permanent at its own URL, so you can pick up exactly where you stopped. The sequence matters, each day builds on the previous one's artifact, but the pace is yours.

9 / 30

Week 2, Apply · Day 9 of 30

Day 9: Score candidate #1 end-to-end

The boring one, six signals, 15 minutes, one composite.

Day 9 in one paragraph: Running the full composite once feels slow; running it three times in a row makes the procedure muscle-memory. Candidate #1 is intentionally the boring one so you're calibrating with low emotional stakes. You will spend about five minutes, end with a concrete artifact, and the whole curriculum stays free at this URL permanently.

Where this day sits in the 30

Week 2 combines the atomic signals into a composite score and runs it against real candidate orgs. Day 9 of 30 sits 30% of the way through, in week 2, apply, one of four one-week phases. This day also carries a bonus exercise for anyone with extra time. Everything in this challenge is built from public GitHub signals, the same data that powers the weekly deal-flow feed, and the day's lesson is worth roughly €79 in equivalent consulting time by the anchoring we use across the curriculum.

Yesterday

Yesterday you picked three candidates and wrote a gut prediction for each. Today, the boring one gets the full composite.

Why this signal matters

Running the full composite once feels slow; running it three times in a row makes the procedure muscle-memory. Candidate #1 is intentionally the boring one so you're calibrating with low emotional stakes.

The 5-minute exercise

1Open your candidate #1 GitHub org in one tab.
2Run signal 1 (commit velocity), note the +0/+1.
3Run signal 2 (contributor diversity), note the +0/+1.
4Run signals 3-6 the same way. 90 seconds each.
5Total composite. Compare to your gut prediction.

What you’re filtering for

A composite score (0-6) and a one-sentence note for each signal: what the data showed and how confident you are.

Edge case

If you stall on signal 3 (dependents graph) because the page is empty, that's not zero, that's 'private distribution' and it deserves a note, not a default 0.

Bonus

Watch the clock. If you're at 25+ minutes on candidate #1, you're over-thinking. The whole point of the manual procedure is that it's fast enough to run on every founder you meet.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow: candidate #2, the obvious one. Your prediction was probably high, let's see whether the composite agrees.

Common questions about day 9

How long does day 9 take?: About five minutes of hands-on work against the org you picked on day one. The reading adds another two or three. If you are short on time the exercise alone still delivers the day's point.
Do I need any tools or paid data for score candidate #1 end-to-end?: No. Every exercise in the challenge runs on public GitHub data and a browser. The feed that automates the same checks is available, but the curriculum itself is deliberately tool-free so the habit lands before the tooling.
What if I miss a day?: Every day is permanent at its own URL, so you can pick up exactly where you stopped. The sequence matters, each day builds on the previous one's artifact, but the pace is yours. Many people run the 30 days across six or seven weeks instead of four.

Curriculum: /challenge · Methodology: /methodology · Paper: ssrn.com/abstract=6606558